Don’t you absolutely hate those Made For AdSense sites and blogs that have been polluting the ‘net for quite some time now? I mean, it’s all right to have an actual blog—one that’s active, and one that has useful, original content—and have a reasonable amount of ads on it (hey, one’s gotta pay the bills, right?). But some people have the gall to set up blogs without relevant content at all, and have ads plastered all over (we had some talk about splogs here and here). Some even go to the extent of scraping content off other people’s sites, quoting verbatim and not even citing sources. Some even have automated systems that scrape content off RSS feeds. Lazy people!

But then again, MFA blogs are old news. Today, apparently, it’s the Made for Linkbait blogs and sites that are gaining popularity. That’s because of all this social media crap that’s been gaining ground. It’s social this, social that, social everything. It’s mostly about people. And having a ton of people linking to your site from the popular social bookmarkers is one surefire way of getting good traffic and potentially good revenue in the future.

There’s nothing wrong with publishing something really useful and having people link to your work. You’re doing a service to the community, after all. But if all you’re doing is some sensationalizing, with having a lot of people linking to you as the primary intention and motivation, then hold up, dude. There’s something wrong with your reasoning. And this is one of the pitfalls of social media, and a drawback of social bookmarking and social news sites. Techsoapbox has this to say.

I’ve covered shortcomings of user-generated content sites like Digg before. I’ve pointed out how people quickly jump on a bandwagon without checking facts. It seems one of the first things to go with user-generated content is fact-checking.

And so we have sites that spring up overnight with some sensational headline, grab a ton of links, and then a few months later either have ads thrown all over them or are redirected to another site for SEO-benefits (after gaining a few hundred diverse links).
...
This has been happening for a while. But in the last month it has gotten worse, and it is really starting to appear everywhere now. All these sites follow classic linkbaiting hooks. And while the three links I mentioned were all from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and the rest all suffer from the same problem.

Ahmed points out, though, that MFA sites are the problem of the search engines. MFL sites, meanwhile, are the problem of just about everyone who blogs. After all, it’s the bloggers who love to link, right?

Just make sure you think twice before you link! For all you know, you might have bit the bait, and you’re in for it hook line and sinker.

Related Articles

Related posts:

1. AdSense Gets Targeting All Wrong
2. Re-Thinking Paid Links
3. Snarkbait Is the New Linkbait
4. Google Wants You To Report Paid Links. WTF?
5. Don’t You Just Hate Sponsored Posts? What About Sponsored Blogs?